Twilight of the Wolves (10 page)

I have found you, Xhal appeared beside him on the wall watching the skeletal trees, the suns falling to the horizons.

I am glad.

You do not look well.

I am dying. I will be a demon.

Yes, but that is no reason to despair. I have seen and heard what you do. You are trying to care for the city.

Perhaps.

Does it help?

It helps them.

But not enough. Never enough. They will die with or without you.

Sao put his face in his hands and leaned on his elbows, head over the wall, I do not know what to do. I bring them food and water and try to make them human again but they die, they hunger. I wash them but they remain dirty. I teach them but they are ignorant. More ignorant even than me.

What will you do?

I hunger.

For meat.

For everything. There are moments where I want to kill them but I feel no anger. Only the drive. The compulsion to kill. I imagine eating everything. In my dreams I am a monster. I eat the children and their mothers. I murder their fathers and wash them in his blood. I am strong and I grow stronger and in my dreams I am a wolf like the one who touched me. I run through the trees and I have a pack. Hundreds of us at times, howling at the fragmented moon. I have seen visions while yet I am awake of a moon that is not broken. Then the vision changes and the moon cracks and wolves step from the part that falls to earth. The moon birthed the wolves and they spread into the land and brought the trees to life and all the rest. If not for the wolves the world would not be a forest.

The world is changing. It is not a forest. Not any longer. More of it is lost every day and the war makes it worse.

So what do we do?

Xhal barked, Ariel do nothing. We do not need humans and so we no longer speak with them.

Why are you here?

To record what I see. For when the humans are no more, so Ariel may remember these strange creatures, so young, so proud
and volatile.

You will not intercede?

And do what? Tell them to stop? You cannot even make them care for one another long enough to stop killing their others. You have seen as much. They will not even reach down to help the smallest of their sisters, denying even them humanity. I am other to them, and they would wage war on Ariel if they could.

What do you know about wolves?

Xhal shook its head and touched his elbow, Wolves are very old. Impossibly old. From them came everything else. They are the parents, the brothers, the sisters of all that live. Even the trees. Especially the trees. Do you know how wolves mate? They mate like all else but they perform unions which is where your marriage comes from, though no human remembers this. After the mother gives birth, they become one. This union lasts forever and joins them to the Memory of the World and the Dream. They become one and this union forms a tree and this tree unites them with eternity and the planet. Not every tree, but the trees of the forest. The forest that was the world. Their roots stretch and wrap around the very heart of the world. But humans destroy them more and more and the wolves despair and hide. You see, not all wolves can form a union. They must be halves of the same life. Some never meet their other half, their reflection, and some who do choose to remain sentient.

I do not understand.

Wolves are not demons.

But I am.

It is only a human word.

I am afraid.

You must not be. If you fear what you will be then you will be frightening. All that will happen has happened and so there is naught to fear.

What will become of me?

Xhal took Sao’s face in its hands and stared into his eyes, What
will become of you? They remained so for a moment, then Xhal touched their foreheads together, eyes still open, and let go. It said, You are leaving.

I cannot stay.

What do you search for?

I do not know.

Xhal frowned or smiled and patted his elbow, You will be okay. I trust that you will be okay.

Thank you, Xhal.

Xhal barked followed by its chiming laughter, I will see you again, I think, Sao the demon. I hope I do. Live and be well.

Sao opened his mouth to speak but only watched as Xhal’s wings unfolded and stretched wide and it took flight, disappearing into the winter night, catching gusts of wind.

Every day we send more and more soldiers away and what do they do? They steal our crops, our livestock. They trample through and take our young men away to fight whoever they will. We are the Federation! We’re meant to be free, but this, Minstru Vesna’s war. Who does it help?

It helps us all! It keeps us safe. She wouldn’t send us to fight only to die. No, we’re extending the Federation, offering a hand to the villagers along the way. If they join with us then we’ll protect them but we can only protect and watch over our children. Let those who refuse rot!

But who do we fight?

We fight injustice! The Dragonlords burn and enslave foreigners, our brothers and sisters. The King of Garasu starves his people to make his palaces shine! These are monsters!

But Luca thrives.

Sao sat at the end of their bench but did not look at the women talking. Drunk, shouting, pounding on the table.

I hear Luca’s in trouble from all sides.

Luca will last through the war. We all need Luca even as we
need Drache and the Crown. We can’t fight the Crown anymore than they can fight us.

Why?

All too big like, aye?

When giants wrestle

All humanity suffers.

So what do they fight for?

For freedom.

For power.

Weeks became months and seasons and years wandering the Federation from its far western reaches to the bitter cold of the north and the walls of forest in the south. The people all the same but always saying different words that meant the same thing. The poor and the helpless died before his eyes while those who ruled thrived and lived behind large edifices where no outsiders were allowed. They spoke of freedom and bondage, of the glory of Vulpe and the atrocities of the Crown and the Dragonlords. The markets teemed with people from all over the Federation in different shades of brownred, from hirsute to bare, from artists to musicians to merchants and whores. He spent many nights amongst the bought boys examining the structures of power and illusion holding them in place. The women he met fell into him and his awesome heat and made names for him that were not his own. Blackheart, Hurricane, Moonchild, Wolfboy, and many more worked their way into his consciousness only to fall away from him with the turn of a season or new news of the war. The boys taken from all corners of Vulpe to live in barracks and learn the tools of murder. From the small village co-ops to the grand cities boasting a thousand years of history or more, the hearts of civilisation, he was told. Feeding the hungry, washing the sick, he was given other names by the dying: Twilight Star, Mother, Sister, Brother.

North of Valencia on the outskirts of Volant he stood under a
vacant canopy, all the trees skeletal, snow fluttering down. The music of the trees different, far away, gloaming, echoing off the grey sky. And then howling. His heart dropped, his body on fire, and he was running, the cold blearing his vision, stabbing his lungs.

The wolves walked and he followed. Large and white, indistinguishable from the snow but for their noses and eyes. The female had two tails and the male had three and Sao watched them sway. They walked south and the female’s ears flicked and she raised her head. The male bolted, running, followed by the female and Sao chased, falling behind, his legs on fire, his lungs full of glass, his vision slowed and opaque, and he lost sight of them quickly. The boundaries heavy and thick and all around, anger flared within him, desperation, and he yelled from deep in his bowels through his lungs and rushing from his mouth until he howled. His body on fire, burning the snow away before it reached him, he ran, tearing through the snow until they appeared far away still running. His heart leapt and he pushed harder, faster, until he was beside them, running through the trees, the snow all round. All was white.

They ripped the flesh from the elk, their jaws wet and dark with its blood. His mouth full of spit that he swallowed over and over, he watched the sky, vast and grey beyond the blacktrees. The smell filled him, swirling through and around as a frenzied torrent. Sitting in the snow, the female snorted at him but he waved his hand for her. She ate.

The smell of men and fire. The wolves’ fur bristled but they loped away. Sao watched them but did not move and they stopped, turned to him, their large pulsing eyes on him. Smiling, he walked towards the scent. The wolves sat.

Short and sinewy, his hair black and to his waist, the moons
on his cheeks filled, dark sickle moons. Spring blossomed round him, the fecund scent inside him, beating his heart and filling his lungs. All the world was a forest. All the world was green. The smoke rose through the trees and filled the blushing sky, and the men and their fires appeared. Several took axes and many more sat round in thick leather dyed black and red.

The first to see ignored Sao but the others called him over, demanding his name and what he was doing there. When he entered the clearing, their eyes hardened and their jaws set. Who are you, a tall dark bearded man demanded, his voice rasped.

Sao stopped at the edge of the trees, You must leave the forest alone.

They laughed, first nervously, then louder.

The woodcutter to Sao’s left continued chopping and Sao rushed, ripped the axe from his hands, breaking his left arm and wrist, then he threw the axe at the bearded man who spoke, the blunt side hitting his chest, knocking him to the ground.

Movement began in all directions. The men grabbed their weapons and rushed Sao and the wolves burst through the treeline, ripping the men apart, taking them in their jaws and throwing them meters through the air, ripping arms and legs from torsos. Sao fought the thirty men who had stopped to rest with the wolves, like a wolf. His blood boiling, his eyes flaring, the gold bands thickening in his irises.

They stopped at a river where the wolves drank. He washed the blood from their fur then disrobed and entered the cold winter-water. The steam rose and shrouded him as he scrubbed his hands and his face, over and over and over, the tears streaming, a howl caught in his chest, expanding until he heard the wolves howling beside him, and he stopped scrubbing. Walking towards them, the male and female howling side by side, he scratched beneath their wet jaws, then wrapped his arm around the male who kept howling. The female nuzzled him and he put an arm
round her as well, and she took up howling once more.

Far away, he watched the fires erupt and glow. The screams and explosions reached the forest and silenced its music. The wolves sat ten meters below, their eyes staring through the wood, through the dimensions of spacetime to the battlefield. The wind blew the reek of killing and Death to them and Sao snorted. Dirigibles poured fire onto the fields that were once forest.

The moons rose, sickled and whole, the planet burned, and the men died.

Sao watched until bluedawn when the fires turned to embers and smoke clouded the sky for leagues.

I tell you, not safe any longer anywhere beyond the forest.

The world is::a forest.

The world was a forest.

The large man snorted, shifted the embers of the fire. Two men sat slumped against one another across from him with a third lying asleep to his right under a bundle of leaves and skins. The two redskinned men were long and wiry with shaved heads but for a topknot. Masks of metal bolted into their skulls, one on the left hemisphere of his face and the other mirrored on the right side, their flesh eyes painted, the other a lens on a collapsible scope, and intricate patterns tattooed over their backs and chests and faces like alloy veins coursing through. Identical in build but separated by age, the tattooed men moved with unnatural synchronicity and spoke in duet, their words coming from each other’s mouths, alternating, aluminum.

Where you from, the big man said.

They looked at one another, the fire revealing only the edges of their expression, and turned to him, speaking with two voices, the old high and weak, the young low and gravelled, We come from far::far from the east::past mountains and::rivers you have never::heard.

Aye, but you speak Limpa.

We speak many::many languages::Limpa for you::Rocan for Rocans::Iliox for Ariel and even::Spreche for Drache.

He nodded, regarded them through the red flickering glow battling the shadows, What do you make of—What do I call you lot?

We are Erin::and Nire, they gestured towards one another.

Aye, I’m Cerill, he shifted the embers again, a few catching flight like fireflies, Must’ve been quite a journey from—From where?

They looked at one another, then back, speaking in one cacophonous voice, Yiyuyan.

Cerill coughed, choking on his saliva, You’re Yi?

We are.

He leaned back and slapped his knee, By Death, what are—why? Why are you here? You’re not shitting me, aye? Never met a Yi before. No one has, far as I know. But if you’re blowing up my ass, don’t. Too old and tired to be blued around.

We are Yi.

Death be still! he stroked his stomach, I’m probably the only one for days and weeks who knows even the smallest bit about Yi, and even that’s as good as nothing. What’s it like, Yiyuyan? I hear it’s a paradise. Trees as thick as a palace and as high as a mountain, lakes that’re cool and still and rivers so pure it can raise the dead.

They turned to one another and whispered in metallic percussive words that Cerill did not understand but which drifted in him and echoed, growing stronger and stronger, connecting to tissue and feeding on the molecules and atoms. They stood then and turned around, Erin’s right foot against Nire’s left, and the language of metal swept out of Cerill but left seeds within.

He approached them, the wolves lying within hearing distance but hidden. His hand raised high, he spoke in Vulpe,
then Garasu, and then the language of his youth, I have no weapon. I come only to sit by the fire.